March 2012

03/31/2012

The sheer noise and spray of rhetorical fæces produced by the swarms of pygmy wretches infecting the U.S. political system these days makes it hard, sometimes, to reconstruct the full metal weirdness of the state of the nation way back when. That would have been my teen years, in the ‘70s, that time when those of us who aspired to the writing life had to buy our slates and no. 2 chisels directly from actual carbon-based life forms. We did so while watching the triumph and collapse of the King Rat of crazed, feral politicians, the 37th of his office, our own unindicted co-conspirator, Richard Milhouse Nixon. (Cue this number.)

It’s truly hard to convey just how evil, absurd, and oddly grand Nixon was to those who have only experienced the banal corruptions and miseries of the current scene, but the trademark Nixonian mix of paranoia, calculation, and genuine aspiration to statesmanship produced public theater the likes of which I do not think we’ll see again in my lifetime. Just how odd? Well, to get a taste, just a hint of the nooks and crannies of history into which even Tricky Dickie’s most trivial by-blows could lead, check out Joe Kloc’s tale of one man’s pursuit of what might be termed Nixon’s moon-struck folly.

03/29/2012

In 2004, a Seattle-based researcher, Steven Gilbert, published a 280-page paperback titled A Small Dose of Toxicology. You might not guess from that modest title that the author was on a scientist on a crusade. But he was. He is.

"It's critical that we scientists be more engaged with the public," he says."We're talking about environmental issues that are having a bigger and bigger impact on our lives." He had big goals for the book too - he wanted it to contribute to public awareness, to encourage people to demand more of a government response, greater corporate responsbility. He wanted it to change things: "We have an ethical responsibility to our children."

Gilbert had a long-time background in the study of poisonous things. He received a PhD in toxicology from the University of Rochester in 1986. He was founder of the non-profit Institute of Neurotoxicology and Neurological Disorders in Seattle, an affiliate professor at the University of Washington. His particular area of study was in the area of low-dose exposures to toxic chemicals, an area that he was uneasily aware remained poorly understood.

And after some years, he just wasn't sure that the paperback was having the hoped for effect. Or that his publisher was particularly enthusiastic. So he decided to take it on as a DIY project. "I was originally disappointed. Then, I thought, well I could do this myself." First, he started a website, Toxipedia, which provides a free, searchable database of information on toxic chemicals. And then he started his own e-book publishing company, Healthy World Press, and published the second edition of A Small Dose of Toxicology himself.

The book is one of three now published by Healthy World and all follow the same model. They are offered as free downloads in either e-pub, Kindle, or pdf format from the Toxipedia website. There's a requested donation to Gilbert's non-profit but it's not required. "My first goal wasn't to make money," he said. "It was to have an impact."

I contacted Gilbert after discovering his e-book on the Toxipedia site. This was not, um, my first visit there in search of poisonous information. It's a natural consequence of writing a book about poisons and blogging on that same subject over the last few years. Really. Although sometimes I worry that the search history on my hard drive, riddled with visits to Toxipedia, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, and their ilk suggests the habits of a fairly iffy character.

But anyway - and more to the point, I recognized in Gilbert's work an awareness not unlike my own - that we exist in a chemical world, that we've yet to map that complicated terrain or fully understand its risks. And that as our adventures in chemistry - taking as a simple example, rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere - change our planet, there's an imperative need to do tell that story better.

Still I was curious.

One can admire the crusade and still wonder if it's actually accomplishing anything. I wondered whether Gilbert's decision to go to e-self publishing improved the paper product in any meaningful way. And it's with those questions in mind that I now want to address the book directly. For comparison purposes, I downloaded it in two different versions on my iPad, as an e-pub (which went direct to my iBooks library) and as a pdf. It's also possible to simply read the book on-line here.

At its most basic, A Small Dose of Toxicology remains a reader-friendly reference book. As my pdf version tells me, it's still 280 pages. It has 21 chapters (although I had to count them because in the e-version, they are not numbered in the table of contents). The book starts with an overview - "Toxicology and You" , followed by a brief history of poisons and their studies, followed by chapters that focus on a specific toxic substance or issue. The first three chapters do this through a lens of everyday consumption: alcohol, caffeine, nicotine. The book then explores such famously poisonous materials as arsenic, mercury and lead before moving onto subjects such as as endocrine disrupters and radiation exposure.

In other words , it contains many small doses of information about many toxic things. You can see exactly why a poison-obsessed writer like myself would go for the material. But the better thing about it is that it's not written for someone like me. Gilbert is aiming for a more general audience (he tells me he hopes to see it used in high school classrooms) and he succeeds in making this a solidly written, clear, and occasionally fascinating exploration of toxic chemistry.

Of course, it's hard to make poison too boring. Still, he has a nice technique of using everyday examples to create level-headed explanations, for instance in this section on calculating a toxic dose:

"There are approximately 100 mg of caffeine in a cup of coffee. The actual amount of caffeine depends on the coffee beans, how the coffee was prepared, and size of the cup. And adult weighing 155 pounds (about 70 kg) who consumes this cup of coffee would receive a dose of 100 mg divided by 70 kg or 1.4 mg/kg of caffeine. The importance of including body weight becomes clear if you consider a child who weighs 5 kg (about 11 pounds). If this child consumed the same amount of coffee, the dose would be 100 mg/5 kg or 20 mg/kg, more than ten times higher than the adults."

And he weaves such examples throughout his story, later calculating the half-life of a cup of coffee in the body (about four hours), later again looking at the effect of pregnancy on that half-life question: "During the last two trimesters of pregnancy, caffeine metabolism decreases, and the half-life increases to about twice normal, or 8-10 hours. This means that after caffeine consumption both the material blood levels and the infant's exposure will stay higher for a longer period of time."

These facts and examples are neatly ordered. Each chapter begins with a "quick facts" chart, followed by a history of the specific poison and its use in society (lead in pipes and paint, mercury in thermometers and so forth), followed by case studies - the recent discovery of lead in children's lunch boxes where it was used to stabilize the plastic - followed by information about health effects, ongoing research, and government regulations.

Occasionally, though, the author goes beyond textbook into advocacy: "We need to reduce the use of lead in a wide range of consumer products," Gilbert writes in the chapter about that heavy metal. These opinionated moments and his sense of story telling, lift the book beyond standard textbook. Although I suspect that also means that it won't appeal to readers from the anti-environmental movement.

But, you may ask, couldn't he present the advocacy and information just as neatly in a print format? And I've come to believe that he couldn't. Oh, the downloaded books have some of the usual glitches we find in these early days of e-book publishing. I complained earlier that the table of contents in the pdf version didn't provide page numbers for chapters. The iBook version I downloaded skipped the table of contents entirely (I could have tried again for a better result but I just flipped over to the pdf for the information).

But, but, the e-version does work in ways that would just not be possible in print - by which I mean that it offers a dazzling array of live links to additional information and resources. The introduction is followed by four pages of links to regulatory agencies and other organizations around the world that archive information on toxic materials. Further links stud the text and there are yet more at the end of each chapter. Not to mention links to graphics, powerpoints, interactive posters.

Gilbert is especially proud of his Milestones of Toxicology poster, which you can link to from the book or here from the website. The poster has now been translated into ten languages, mostly recently Arabic. A Chinese translation is in the works. He also likes the idea that as publisher of his own e-book, he can keep it updated. When I talked to him, he was already planning to add new research papers into the book and, in fact, planning a third edition that would make better use of his website and contain more hyperlinks to Toxipedia.

Yes, empire-building already out in the digital universe. But in a good cause. We really do need to know more about poison.

Deborah Blum is a Pulitzer-prize winning science writer and the author of five books, most recently the best-selling The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York. She is a professor of journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

03/26/2012

I Heard the Sirens Scream: How Americans Responded to the 9/11 and Anthrax Attacks, by Laurie Garrett. 2011. Kindle

Reviewed by Maia Szalavitz

Laurie Garrett is the only reporter to win the three major prizes for journalism: the Pulitzer, the Peabody and the Polk (she won that one twice).

Her first book, The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance was a New York Times bestseller. Her follow up, Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health, also brought the threat of infectious disease into sharp focus (disclosure: I am acknowledged in it for help on addiction information related to IV drug use). Her work on AIDS and Ebola (for which she won the Pulitzer) is stellar, and she is an essential writer and thinker on public health.

Her latest, I Heard the Sirens Scream: How Americans Responded to the 9/11 and Anthrax Attacks, was published as an ebook on the 10th anniversary of those events. Like her prior work, it is relentlessly and thoroughly reported, profoundly important and often compelling. Any historian of 9/11 focused on public health will have to reckon with this work.

03/23/2012

Why The Net Matters: How the Internet Will Save Civilization. By David Eagleman, Canongate Books, 2010. (For iPad)

Reviewed by Seth Mnookin

Unless you landed at Download the Universe with the mistaken impression that it’s a new torrent aggregator, chances are you’re already familiar with David Eagleman, the 40-year-old Baylor College of Medicine neuroscientist/author/futurist. Perhaps you’re one of the millions of people around the world who was dazzled by Sum, Eagleman’s breathtaking, oftentimes brilliant, collection of short stories about the afterlife—or perhaps it was Incognito, Eagleman’s exploration of the unconscious, that caught your eye. (It’s not everyday, after all, that a pop-sci book pulls off the tricky balancing act of simultaneously appealing to the cognoscenti and the hoi polloi.)

Or maybe you’re like me, and you can no longer remember when you first became aware of Eagleman and his work--you just know you’re curious about whatever it is he decides to tackle next because it will inevitably be interesting and erudite and thought-provoking and, in all likelihood, fun.

03/21/2012

One morning a couple of weeks ago, I found myself atop a dirt mound, surrounded on all sides by green hills and trees, watching a man in a pit.

Wearing a blue hardhat and matching shirt, he was slowly, steadily, tediously swinging a shovel into the muddy walls around him, paying no mind to the gawking tourists above. All of his attention was fixed on unearthing some shiny yellow nuggets: imperial topaz.

The gemstone, which can range in color from dingy champagne to deep tangerine, is found almost exclusively here in Minas Gerais (Portuguese for “general mines”), Brazil. My tour guide said it fetches some $2,000 per carat.

For all I learned that day about the country’s landscape, economy and the harsh business of mining, I didn’t entirely grasp the natural science behind these sparkling commodities. What created the imperial topaz? Why is it so rare? Why is it sometimes yellow and sometimes red? When I got home, I turned to the Gems and Jewels app on my iPad to fill in the blanks.

03/19/2012

E.O. Wilson's Life on Earth by Gael McGill, Edward O. Wilson & Morgan Ryan. Wilson Digital, 2012. iTunes. (Chapter 1 available for free. This book can only be viewed using iBooks 2 on an iPad. iOS 5 is required.)

by John Hawks

Last week I was meeting with other biology faculty discussing how to revamp biology education. Faculty, students, education researchers, and institutions all want to see innovations, and they often have competing demands. A number of foundations are now trying to develop teaching units for introductory biology. Taking a "modular" approach, some are focusing on materials that can be used and reused in different courses. Others are trying a "one size fits all" approach by making textbooks to fit every course.

"Life on Earth" is a new textbook project by the E. O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation. The foundation's goal is to supply a full biology textbook suitable for high school biology. The book is one of the first to take full advantage of Apple's new iBooks format, with embedded video, three-dimensional models, self-quizzes and other add-ons integrated seamlessly in the text. The foundation intends to make the book available for free on the iBooks platform, and a sample chapter along with additional material is presently available for download to the iPad.

Some would argue that educational "innovation" is too often just window-dressing -- shopworn ideas in new, flashy clothing. Personally I tend to agree. It may be great to be able to bring knowledge to students for free, in the open. Saving school districts money may not be an unalloyed good, but it ain't evil. Still, openness isn't enough. The materials also have to be effective. When I opened "Life on Earth", I was skeptical...

...right up to the point where I started playing with the 3-D image of a nucleosome, a complex of proteins and DNA that enables tight packing of DNA within chromosomes. Freely rotating the entire structure enabled me to see the relatively small size of the protein element of the nucleosome, and the way that the DNA double helix doubles around a protein core in two tight coils. Playing with this model immediately provides a spatial understanding of the structure that no textbook before ever gave me.

03/16/2012

In the opening section of her long essay, Living Architecture (based on a TED talk), materials designer Rachel Armstrong lays out the problem facing all urban residents in a crisp, moving description of Sendai in the wake of the 2011 earthquake. Buildings in the coastal region of Japan had buckled and crumbled, and its streets pulsed with contaminated water. First responders tried to rescue a dog, but found that it wouldn't leave until they followed it to an area where they discovered another dog, barely breathing. Both animals were taken to safety and given medical attention. What this sad scene underscored was that in the face of disaster, all forms of life try to help each other survive.

Encapsulated in that tale of two dogs is also the problem and, possibly, a solution to troubles in modern cities. As Armstrong explains, metropolitan areas will be home to nearly two thirds of the Earth's population in the next half century, but they are breakable, dangerous, and depend on unsustainable forms of energy. Still, those cities are filled with life that can make it through disasters that shatter buildings. Armstrong, whose research touches on synthetic biology, asks whether it might not be better to build cities that are as resilient (and compassionate) as the lives inside of them.

03/14/2012

The BBC's hugely popular modern reboot of Sherlock Holmes recasts the world's greatest detective as a high-functioning sociopath (by his own admission) who augments his legendary detection skills with all the latest technologies. Oh, and Watson has a blog.

But his account of their first case together, "A Study in Pink," rubs the detective the wrong way, because Watson has the bad taste to point out glaring holes in Holmes' otherwise impressive encyclopedic knowledge -- namely, he hasn't bothered to learn that the Earth revolves around the Sun. "It's primary school stuff, how could you not know that?" Watson marvels. An exasperated Holmes explains that his big fat brain is precious real estate and he just can't be bothered to store useless trivia; he has to focus on the important things that will help him solve real-world cases.

Watson: But it's the solar system!

Holmes: Oh, hell! What does that matter?! So we go around the sun! If we went around the moon or round and round the garden like a teddy bear, it wouldn't make any difference! All that matters to me is the work! Without that, my brain rots. Put that in your blog - or better still, stop inflicting your opinions on the world!

Let's not address Sherlock's somewhat antiquated notion of how memory works for now. (The computer hard drive analogy is soooo 2000.) I've got good news for the technology-loving consulting detective: now he doesn't have to store all that useless information about celestial bodies in his crammed-to-the-gills noggin, because science writer Marcus Chown and Touch Press have gathered all the essentials into a single iPad app/e-book: The Solar System. It's the follow-up to the publisher's impressive debut, The Elements (reviewed by Deborah Blum here).

03/12/2012

There's something delightfully transgressive in writing an essay celebrating Johannes Gutenberg, the man who invented the printing press, and publishing it in a medium that may end the dominance of his creation. In fact, in his new Kindle single Gutenberg the Geek, Jeff Jarvis wastes no time with sentimentality over the decline of print. Instead, he argues that Gutenberg should be an inspiration to present day entrepreneurs and "the patron saint of Silicon Valley." It might seem strange to review an ebook about the printing press on a site dedicated to science writing, but bear with me. Jarvis argues that we are in a period of upheaval that parallels the upheaval of the 15th century, where the internet plays the disruptive role that the printing press once did, and he believes that the consequences for society may be more profound than we realize.

The eerie similarities between the printing press and the internet that Jarvis describes would be familiar to anyone that's read his blog, but may surprise newcomers. From cashflow problems and venture capital to secrecy and idea-stealing competitors, Gutenberg had to deal with many of the same challenges as today's technology entrepreneurs. Jarvis describes how

Jarvis does not contribute any new scholarship on Gutenberg here - he freely admits that his historical exposition is taken entirely from other authors. But for those not well acquainted with 15th century Europe, he does a good job condensing previous work on Gutenberg to set the stage. Beginning with Gutenberg's childhood in the German city of Mainz, we're introduced to an era rife with conflict. Nobility battled for control over resources and oppressed peasants rose up against their lords. Throw in a debt crisis (with Gutenberg's hometown playing the role of Greece) and political upheaval (the Reformation rather than the Arab Spring) and Jarvis makes it easy to see echoes of the past in present day circumstances.

03/09/2012

My attachment to science started out as a love of the natural world. My childhood was filled with national parks, nature specials, natural history museums, and picture books, all filled with the amazing things from our world and its past. These books were packed with photos and illustrations of places I'd never travel to, and they introduced me to the Cambrian and Devonian, took me to the depths of the ocean, and generally nourished the early stages of my science addiction.

The beautiful color images that the books contained would have failed miserably on the black-and-white screens of the early eBook readers. But they're a perfect match for the latest tablet screens, which can make their photos look about as good as they do in print. So I was excited to pick up DK Publishing's Natural History: Mammals - Carnivores, figuring it would let me find out whether an eBook provided a satisfying trip into my past. It didn't, and I don't think that's only because I've grown out of it.